Prizes are the part of a read-a-thon organizers overthink and the part students decide everything by. This page covers the one commercial decision you have to make, what actually arrives at your school and who handles it, and the incentives that move participation without costing anything.
For the whole fundraiser, start with the complete guide to running a read-a-thon; this page is the prize-and-incentive layer underneath it.
The two packages
You choose one at setup. It's the only real commercial decision in the fundraiser.
Prize store — your school keeps 75%
Readers earn RAT Bucks based on the donations they raise, then spend them in the prize store on toys, games, and books. They choose what they want, which matters more than it sounds — a prize a child picked is worth more to them than a better prize somebody else selected.
We source, buy, and ship everything to your school. You don't research prizes, place orders, chase suppliers, or spend a dollar up front. What you do handle is the last step: prizes arrive to be sorted by class and passed out by class. It's not nothing — budget an afternoon for it and, if you have volunteers, this is the one moment they're genuinely useful.
No prize store — your school keeps 80%
A higher share of donations, and you sponsor your own rewards. Read-A-Thon supplies over 100 coupon templates, printed at no extra charge — extra recess, a pyjama day, lunch with the principal, front-of-the-lunch-line passes, that kind of thing. You still sort and distribute by class.
Which one to choose
The arithmetic looks like it favours 80%, which is why organizers reach for it. Before you do, price what you're taking on.
With the prize store, your 25% covers sourcing, purchasing, and shipping physical goods to your building. Without it, you keep an extra 5% of donations and take on all three yourself — plus the cost of whatever you award, which comes out of that same 5%. If the rewards you sponsor cost real money, the extra 5% can disappear before you've counted your own hours.
Choose the no-prize-store package when:
- Your rewards are experiences, not objects. This is the strongest case. Extra recess, a read-in, a dress-down day, and principal-for-an-hour cost your school nothing and are frequently more motivating than a plastic toy. The coupon templates are built for exactly this, and the 5% becomes real margin rather than a prize budget.
- You have local sponsors who'll donate rewards outright. If your board already knows the ice cream shop and the trampoline park, your prize cost is zero and the extra 5% is pure gain.
- You have an existing prize program. Some schools already run a school-wide incentive system and would rather fold the read-a-thon into it than run two.
Choose the prize store when:
- You're a first-time organizer. One fewer thing to invent, and the part students care most about is handled by someone who has done it thousands of times.
- Your volunteer bench is thin. Sourcing and buying prizes is the kind of task that quietly consumes a fundraising chair's February.
- You want tangible prizes without the logistics. Students who want a physical thing to earn, without you becoming a purchasing department.
You can see what students actually choose from in the prize catalog. Worth doing before you decide — organizers who assume the store is a bin of tat are usually surprised.
You pick your package at setup, and signing up is free — about ten minutes, no credit card, no contract, no fundraising minimum. Start for free.
The incentives that cost nothing
Here's the part that gets missed. The prize store drives individual effort — a student earning RAT Bucks wants more RAT Bucks. But the thing that moves your total is participation, and participation responds to recognition, which is free.
- Class versus class. The single most effective free incentive in a read-a-thon. Individual students have a ceiling on how much they'll chase a prize; a class in second place behaves differently, and it recruits the students who weren't otherwise going to engage. Report standings by class, not just a school total.
- A visible tracker. A hallway thermometer or a whiteboard number that changes. Ambient, constant, and cheaper than anything else on this list.
- Names on morning announcements. Thirty seconds a day. For a nine-year-old this is not a small thing.
- Grade-level thresholds. "If third grade hits 20,000 minutes, third grade gets a read-in." Collective goals pull in students who don't respond to individual ones.
- Recognition of effort, not just totals. Most improved, most consistent, everyone-who-logged-every-day. This matters — see below.
Design incentives so they don't backfire
Two failure modes, both common, both avoidable.
The leaderboard that names the same three children. If your recognition only ever rewards the top total, everyone outside the top three stops paying attention by about Wednesday — and you've spent your motivational budget on students who were already motivated. Run several categories so different students can win different things.
Rewarding dollars raised in front of the class. Be careful here. The amount a student raises is substantially a fact about their family's network, not their effort. A child whose grandparents are on email and a child whose aren't are not competing on the same terms. Recognise minutes read publicly — that's the student's own work, and it's the measure every child can actually influence.
This is also the reason we track minutes rather than pages or books finished. Students choose their own reading materials at their own level, so every student can participate and feel successful regardless of reading ability. More on that in reading logs and minute tracking, and on motivation generally in getting students genuinely excited.
The honest part
Prizes are not why a read-a-thon works, and a school that treats them as the engine will be disappointed. Donations come from families reaching out to people who love their children. Prizes get a student to open the app; the message they send is what raises the money. If you have one hour to spend, spend it on registration and on getting messages sent, not on prize design — see the teacher's guide for why.
And the sorting is real. Whichever package you pick, someone at your school divides prizes by class and hands them out. It's an afternoon, not a weekend, and it's nothing like a product-fundraiser distribution day — but if you tell your principal there is zero handling, you'll be corrected on delivery day.
What happens next
Pick your package at setup — it's one choice in a ten-minute process, and your fundraising coach can talk it through if you're torn. Then decide your free recognition plan before day one, because class standings only work if you've told everyone the competition exists.
From there, the kickoff is where you announce the incentives, and celebration and awards covers the close-out where they get handed over. If you're still comparing formats, read-a-thon vs. other fundraisers puts the 75/80 split next to what product fundraisers actually net.